estatecreate blog

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Paul Graham has published a great essay on some of the challenges start ups face when trying to raise money. You can see the whole essay here.

He has an interesting strategy on how much money to ask for. He says:
“We advise startups to tell investors there are several different routes they could take depending on how much they raised. As little as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year. A couple hundred thousand would let them get office space and hire some smart people they know from school. A couple million would let them really blow this thing out. The message (and not just the message, but the fact) should be: we’re going to succeed no matter what. Raising more money just lets us do it faster.”

The challenge here is having several funding plans up your sleeve that show different growth rates and also stack up together. To be credible, the plans should show that if an investor puts less money in, the business will not grow as fast and will also have a lower chance of success. The key is putting the lower growth scenario together without putting the investor off and at the same time not making the larger investment easy to pass on because the lower growth scenario looks like a good investment. Why put more money in at the highest risk point when the start up can show good progress with a lower investment?

For me, the difficulty here is that I know if we have less money the chances of our success are greatly reduced. The reason for this is you don’t know what you don’t know and more money allows you to find out, flex your plans and find a successful strategy. Credibly telling an investor that if they give you less money, you are still equally confident of success albeit on a smaller scale, is a challenging balancing act. I will let you know how we get on.

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I am very excited to introduce you to Adrian, our new CTO. Adrian is a tech rock star – he was previously a senior solutions architect at the enterprise search company Fast. He has spent the last 12 months in China and is now fluent in Chinese. I have no idea about the need for a product like estatecreate.com in China, but it could be a lot of fun to find out….

After over a year of presenting PowerPoint slides and talking theory, we are very excited as we now have a product that we can show people.  Our private beta has now started, if you would like to get involved you can register interest at estatecreate.com.

The initial release focuses on the free property website creator. We have tried to design it with simplicity in mind, to allow you to easily add photos, descriptions and maps and choose your own design, creating a free website for your property in about 5 minutes. We will be adding video in a few weeks time.

We would love your feedback so that we can improve the product. I would be very grateful if you could drop me an email with any comments or suggestions to henry@estatecreate.com.

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Today we ventured out of our lair for the first time to give the first ever demonstration of estatecreate.com. The venue was a packed OpenCoffee session on 5th Floor of Waterstones, Piccadilly. The Seedcamp team were out in force, including Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni, as this year’s application process is now open.

We set up our makeshift signage and then spent the next two hours demoing our product to other entrepreneurs and investors.

We received some great feedback and even a few customers. The general consensus was that they liked the free website builder for property and thought the product had legs. There were some great usability comments (particularly from the experts at Clearleft) thank you for those, we are now working on some improvements.

We are aiming to have our private beta out in a week or so. If you would like to be one of the first people to use the site register your email address here: estatecreate.com.